The North Carolina Department of Transportation is getting ready for what could be one of the largest snowstorms in Western North Carolina in a long time.
According to the latest News 13 SkyWatch forecast, the precipitation will start off as rain on Friday, changing to a wintry mix late Friday night into Saturday morning. Then, it could all change to snow for Saturday, but it’s still too early to predict how much snow WNC could see.
UPDATE: WEATHER WARN DAYS FOR POTENTIAL HEAVY SNOW, WINTRY MIX IN WNC THIS WEEKEND
NCDOT officials said on Jan. 20 they’re making early preparations by restocking its salt supplies over the next 48 hours. According to Danny Steelman of the NCDOT’s Avery County Maintenance Yard, that could prove to be challenging. He said that in Avery County alone, it goes through 250–300 tons of salt for every winter storm event.
“The salt shipment is very important. We were starting to get low from all we’ve had (to use). There are so many different places that are using salt right now, especially up North. It’s getting kind of hard to get here,” Steelman said in an WSOC interview.
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The NCDOT said it has enough salt statewide, but refilling orders has been challenging this winter because of the storms in other parts of the country. The NCDOT said it will have plows ready for whatever the weather brings.
Duke Energy officials are also making winter storm preparations across the state. They said they will be ready to respond to downed wires and outages over the weekend.
